Intellectual Property

Economics & InvestingThe Observed Economy: occasional excerpts from my amateur economics and finance research. I view macroeconomics as a tapestry of innovation, production and labor mobility. Financial capital and cultural cohesion appear to be important secondary elements. Of note is the Boom Wave Theory, a model of business cycles with a tactical allocation investing system built on top of it. I also study taxation and education.

Software & Social MediaGames: several original playable games for various platforms.

Eye Scene. A popular discussion forum about eyeglasses I ran from 1997-2011. I wrote the custom forum software in Perl and PHP in 2001 (earlier versions ran on off-the-shelf software). Includes links to follow-on sites, including Moonshiner's version of the site running on the same Perl/PHP software.

Reddit AMA about my search engine projects and work history (ca. 1998 to 2008).

March Madness analysis: The Expectations Index System
Here's a bracket picking system I've been working on for a few years. It's based on historical expectations for each school versus their current seed and falls back on Sagarin scores when it can't decide.

In a nutshell, Expectations Index favors teams who enter the tournament with a seed that corresponds closely to their historical strength when ranked against the other teams in the tourney.

EI is based on school historic tourney wins and current coach's career tourney wins. So Duke is always at the top of the list (i.e. an expected #1 seed) and if they pull a #1 or #2 seed from the selection committee they get a "good" rating on expectations. If they drop lower than #2 in the tourney seeding they get a "bad" rating. Any "good" team is picked to beat any "bad" team, even if it's an extreme upset like an appropriately seeded #16 against a team that doesn't have the historical/coaching portfolio of a typical #1 seed. To fill the other games ("good EI" vs "good EI" or "bad EI" vs "bad EI") I just use the higher Sagarin score.

Expectations Index Final Fourcast for 2018 March Madness (3/11/18): Villanova over Kansas; UNC over Arizona; national champion: Villanova

The EI bracket won my small office competition in 2018 (14 entrants). It was the only bracket in the competition to pick Villanova to win. EI also picked the UMBC upset of Virginia, although it typically picks one or two 16 > 1 upsets per year so this result isn't as surprising as the upset itself.

Teatime

(Pink Floyd were served tea on stage at this point)

Internet Radio & Podcasting

I like a couple of shows from Monocle 24's radio service and the RSS feeds don't seem to appear on their web site (and in one case apparently not even in Google search). So, as a public service, here they are (working as of August 2013):